The Michinoku Coastal Trail (MCT) - NOBO 19 : みちのく潮風トレイル 19

Day 21 of MCT (Michinoku Coastal Trail)
The island of Japanese serow
After checking out the ryokan, we took our “camping gears” boxes to the convenience store next to the ryokan to send them ahead and started walking towards the huge Kesennuma fish market. Though I was very interested in the Shark museum and ice aquarium, it was way before their opening time.
After passing a lot of fishing ships at the port and walking by a nice and modern new shopping area, we arrived a narrow path between old houses. This was the trailhead to go up a short natural trail to Mt. Anba. It was a typical low neighborhood mountain that provides local people multiple trails coming for many different parts of the city for nice daily exercise walks. As we were walking up the trail, we saw some local elders walking too. We greeted them each time and one of them asked us those regular questions, like “where are you guys from?” “Which country are you from? (to Erik)” and of course “Wow so tall, 2m?” to Erik as always. Soon, the natural trail met a driveway crossing the mid-part of the mountain, where we could see a great view of the entire Kesennuma city. The area above the driveway and around the peak was a family-friendly park and the natural trail kept going up there, but MCT route then started following the driveway to go down. It looked only 10 or 15 more minutes walk can get to the peak but it was still the beginning of today’s long walk and we wanted to save time for later, so we didn’t go up any more and walked down the driveway winding down through the trees.
We walked on the road running along the bay, seeing downtown Kesennuma and fishery port now at the opposite side of the bay. There was a view point from where we saw the new big white bridge of Sanriku expressway crossing the mouth of the bay and another smaller white arch bridge beyond it. We were going to cross that arch bridge to walk around Oshima island today.
We crossed under the expressway bridge and kept walking the newly build wide driveway, and earlier than I estimated, we arrived at the small park by the bridge. Both side of the white arch bridge there were small park/parking lots with nice bathroom and vending machines. So, we used the bathroom and got morning coffee/tea for a short break.
Whenever I have to walk on this type of high bridge crossing over rivers and bays, I became a bit of height phobia, as I can clearly see the water surface below my feet. We were lucky today was a very good weather and almost no wind while we were on the bridge. But I don’t even imagine how it would be like walking here when strong wind blows.
Thanks to this bridge, I didn’t really feel we were going to an island. Oshima is so close to the edge of the mainland part that the straights under the bridge looked just a river. After crossing the bridge, we saw the driveway were going through three short tunnels in a row. As we were approaching to the first one, I saw at the corner of my eyesight, there was something standing by the road.
“Why you are standing here!?”
I involuntarily shouted while my eyes blinking in disbelief. It was a Japanese serow, standing right there opposite side of the road on the glassy slope, looking so chill like nothing special happening. By this point, we already know so much that they were not really afraid of human but we still believed they were at least wild animal, rare creature. We still believed that they should not be something that can be just standing by a busy driveway. While we both were gazing at each other for a quite long period, cars were passing by on the driveway between us. Still, the serow didn’t look there was any need for him to walk away. This time, we didn’t wait until he walked into the bush. We left him there and kept walking into the tunnels.
After the three tunnels, we were walking into a big fishermen village and a fishery port. Some fishermen were working to boil seaweed by the sea. We saw a ferry at the port and thought this ferry should be the regular transportation between this island and Kesennuma port and was waiting for next time schedule. Later we learned that this ferry was not active any more, the ferry line between Oshima and Kesennuma ended when the arch bridge was built after the earthquake to give the islanders a much more convenient connection to the city. We took a longer break at the new Michino-eki by the port where we sat at a cute cafe and enjoyed coffee, soft cream and hot sandwiches.
It was very sunny nice day and the driveway ran through a bit inland part of the island. We found an old shrine that looked quite old and had some full-bloom cherry blossom trees, so we walked up the stone stairs. While I was taking pictures of cherry blossoms by the shrine gate, Erik went ahead to the shrine and suddenly halted. “What are you doing?” As I walked up near him, he pointed at the corner right next to the shrine.
There, again, a Japanese serow.
This guy was eating leaves of the tree by a big standing stone statue of Kannon. He was still enjoying the tasty (probably) leaves a bit more, then, looked he was wondering if he should walk away from these strange humans or not for a second. Slowly, almost hesitant, he walked back behind the shrine. We went to the other side of the shrine building to check the back. The serow never looked he was actively wanting to go away but quite reluctantly he seemed to decide to go into the trees.
As we were walking down the road running through sleepy quiet peaceful village in sunny spring day, we were wondering if the serows had been here in this island before the bridge was built or not. If they had been, how they came to the island? Can they actually swim? But they were supposed to inhabit more mountain area, should not be able to swim well enough to cross a sea straights. Then, did they come to this island hundreds of thousands of years ago, probably when this island was still a part of mainland?
Or, did they learn to cross the bridge to come to this island for plenty of tastier glasses and tree leaves?
Quite long long distance, we just walked on a quiet road straight through villages but not as bored as before. Our favorite long distance walk is Shikoku pilgrimage and the MCT route on this Oshima island had very similar atmosphere with Shikoku’s. Some part was running on old unpaved village paths that looked we were walking through someone’s back yard. That kind of route happens a lot in Shikoku pilgrimage, so we felt at home a bit. This road walking continued all along the west side of Oshima until we got to cape Tastumaizaki, the south edge of the island. Before going into the natural trail part of the route, we kept going further to the lighthouse. Today was the perfect blue sky for seeing blue blue ocean and white waves crashing against giant rocks around the cape. We walked down a steep stairs to the sea level to check out a big rock cave tunnel where waves hit one side of the cave wall, bounced back to the other wall and crashed.
Back to the MCT route at the parking of the lighthouse and the cape, we saw a detour notice on the trail sign pole. According to the notice, the detour would take us to avoid the entire part of the natural walking trail just for some fallen trees in a tiny tiny part on the natural trail. Well, we had walked all the way today on paved driveway only to look forward to this natural trail. I know public sectors in Japan were usually super over-cautious and try to make us avoid anything that may have a slight risk. I know, as a person who is involved in local mountain trail maintenance volunteer group, how these fallen trees were usually like. Also, thanks to the modern technology, google map showed us there were some paths connecting the natural walking trail that we can use as escape routes just in case the trail may be so badly damaged that we could not keep walking on.
So, we kept walking into the natural walking trail along the coastal line. It was very well-maintained nice trail. At the first part, there were some very good points from where we could enjoy watching dynamic view of the blue ocean. Soon, the trail started running the forests on slopes and there, nice boardwalk and bridges were placed on the route for us to keep walking comfortably. We could not clearly know where exactly the “fallen tree dangerous point” was, to be honest. There was a part we saw some trees fell and partially blocked the trail but it was not hard at all for us to walk through. Some part of boardwalk looked very old and needed to be replaced with new wood-boards, and actually a big parts of the boardwalk had been already fixed with new strong material. Later half of the nature trail was again through pine trees on cliff and provided us very nice view of the east-side of the island. Quite enjoyably and safely, without any interruptions, we reached a small fishery port and walked along rocky beach until getting back to natural trail through pine tree forests.
At the exit (from our side) we saw the same detour notice hung from the trail signpost. We didn’t see any dangerous parts or ongoing constructions on the trail but, well, we may have been just so lucky today.
The natural trail was about 4km and we still had to walk longer than that on a paved driveway this time to get to our tonight’s lodge. We passed two relatively wide stretch of sand beaches. Back of both beaches, future pine tree forests were planed and protected with wood fences to help their rapid grow. It’d been very nice and sunny all day today. This was literally first time for us to feel that we finally had a certain stretch of natural trail that was like what we expected to walk on in MCT routes.
We walked through a shiny orange sunset on the flat long road and got to our lodge for tonight at dusk.
The dinner tonight was really good with the combination of set dishes and small buffet of additional dishes and deserts. I had totally forgot that I put a note that Erik doesn’t eat seafood when I made booking online. In our happy surprise, they replaced all seafood with meat dishes for him. Aside from the already good and perfect dishes for both of us, there were some more special menu that guests can order. So Erik ordered small cut steak of local speciality, high quality beef.
Although we saw a beautiful sunset, the weather forecast seemed slowly downhill from later tomorrow.